On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:31:01PM +1000, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:

Lars Viklund:

...

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 09:24:41PM +1000, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:

...

Well, then get the DVDs bundled with your Mac and install Xcode from those, or sign up at developer.apple.com and get it there. BTW, Mac users (and esp devs) upgrade very quickly, much faster than, say, Windows users.

I disagree with the assumption that OS X people are quick to upgrade. The last set of figures I saw on adoption were something along the lines of 15% on 10.6, with almost a third of the users on 10.4 and below, taken from some article I read the other week on the rising wave of OS X viruses and countermeasures.

Those numbers sound completely wrong and I'd like to see a credible source before I believe them. As just one data point on Snow Leopard adoption, have a look at

http://daringfireball.net/2009/09/snow_leopard_adoption_rate

I would say that readers of Daring Fireball are fairly tech savvy people with an above average percentage of developers. But consider this,

"it took about five days for 10.6 to pass 10.5"

Five days from the release of the OS for 50% of the DF readers to upgrade to Snow Leopard.

My browser history had it, with what I assume is a much better sample size than "the DF readers", and being much more current: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/apples-mac-defender-update-allows-users-t... Re-visiting the URI, I notice that the low percentages I vaguely recalled were total OS marketshare, not OS X alone. Normalizing 10.6 v. 10.5 v. 10.4 yields this, which aligns with data mentioned in the thread: * 10.6 - 68.6% * 10.5 - 24.4% * 10.4 - 7.0% That's a solid 30% or so not on current OS X. I do have a problem with your "developers are more up to date" argument, as everyone who wants to build any package with native bits needs a toolchain installed. There's a fair amount of such packages on Hackage. This counter-argument is of course void and null if there's popular sane ways to deploy binary application bundles on OS X akin to Bamse, but to my knowledge no such beast exists. -- Lars Viklund | zao@acc.umu.se